Here At Home: A New Lease
2012 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Sarah Fortin
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
A man leaving behind drugs and crime moves into a new home while chasing a plan to travel to New York and reconnect with a well-known actor.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like earnest indie uplift—guy leaves crime, chases dreams—but Fortin resists the redemption arc payoff we're primed for, which is either quietly radical or just uncommitted; either way, it refuses to settle.
A modest documentary-drama hybrid that locates itself in the observational tradition of intimate portraiture, though the tonal mixture of contemplation and the actor-chasing subplot keeps it from achieving the formal clarity that would anchor it in canon.
What makes this work isn't the premise—it's Fortin's decision to let the New York fantasy remain peripheral, letting the actual work of staying home, of domestic stability as its own quiet resistance, become the real subject in a three-minute form that knows exactly when to step back.